Happy Memorial Day!

How can we best honor the fallen?

Memorial Day is strange. I wrote about this notion in Notes today, but as I mentioned in a previous post, I am not certain how many people follow along with Notes here on Substack, and how many people only peruse emails and posts. So, I decided to memorialize my thoughts on this American holiday here as well. I’d honestly hoped to hammer this out earlier, but there is a Clint Eastwood movie marathon on TV, and it is physically impossible not to sit down and watch The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly once that legendary Morricone score busts into your ear like a drunken cowboy through the swinging doors of the local saloon.

I hope you find this a worthwhile read and that it doesn’t clutter up your inboxes too much.

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Why do I find Memorial Day strange?

Well, on one hand, I respect and admire the courageous men and women who braved the horrors of war and paid the ultimate price to defend the ideals of Lady Liberty and all of us blessed to live peacefully, blithely even, under her auspices. I have friends and family who have served, and I know they are extraordinary people, just as many people were who tragically did not return to the warm embrace and the welcoming smiles of their friends and family. I also believe that we have fought against some truly nefarious adversaries that needed to be opposed militarily, that we were right to do so, and I am eternally grateful to those who sacrificed so much to heed that call.

On the other hand, the American military-industrial complex is largely run by greedy, warmongering sociopaths who stage false flags to gin up enough support to send those brave men and women to die horrible deaths in foreign lands under false pretenses for personal power and profit, and who weaponize even those valorous deaths on this day to hijack the genuine respect for the soldiers I mentioned above in order to elicit jingoistic allegiance to their corrupt regimes.

So, it’s strange.

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To that end, I think SCA made a very apt point related to this conundrum.

As I replied to SCA in the aforementioned thread, I concur that many of us—especially our corporate and political elites—love lip-service holidays where they can gain easy PR points for everything from “Pride” to “Patriotism,” but snap back to reality and these promoted groups are often left to wallow in terrible conditions while our controllers march the now placated, self-congratulatory masses off to the next “celebration.”

When I see G-Dubs chuckle at his Freudian slip regarding the “wholly unjustifiable and brutal invasion of Iraq” or Lindsey Graham—who never a met a war he didn’t want someone else’s kids to die in—do the Viagra shuffle at the thought of our tax money killing Russians, it provides a valuable, if painful, reminder of why I don’t blindly swear fealty to any party (especially the Uniparty). Same thing when I read about Obama apparently bragging to aides that he was “really good at killing people.” It seems that endless war is one of the few things many members of both parties can agree on. That, in turn, deepens my respect for iconoclasts like Tulsi Gabbard and Rand Paul.

It is also another chance for me to share an infomercial I have been shopping around to various cable networks. Negotiations are ongoing.

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To quote the late, great Bill Hicks: “There is a point—is there a point to all this? Let’s find a point. Is there a point to my act? I’d say there is. I have to.”

In the subhead of this article I posed a question: how can we best honor the fallen?

Setting aside a day to honor the fallen members of our military may well be a good start, and I do not think that sentiment is undermined if it happens to be accompanied by a bit of patriotic pageantry and paper plates laden with hot dogs and potato salad.

Of course, people who feel strongly that America has used its military for moral and necessary ends will see this day of observance as equally moral and necessary. A small token of our appreciation to the young lives cut short in the festering trenches of Meuse or on the blood-soaked beaches of Normandy. They may say that a single day is, in fact, insultingly insufficient, that we should keep these brave souls in our hearts and minds every day of the year, and I can understand their perspective.

Others may say the holiday itself is just another facet of the “panem et circenses” program of control under which we are living. I can see that perspective as well. They may find the entire observance some distasteful combination of meaningless and manipulative, a grotesque celebration of those who enforced colonial and imperial power across the globe.

They may even point out the uncomfortable fact that not all soldiers are saints, and not all dead are martyrs. This is something I thought about quite a bit when the seemingly perennial debate surrounding war criminals enshrined in Yasukuni-jinja came up while I was living in Japan.

Again, I get it.

But, I still understand that however valid the criticisms of America’s military policy and however corrupt its leadership, for many young soldiers breathing their last, ragged breaths overseas, their belief in these American ideals was real. Real enough to take a bullet. For their families who would never celebrate another holiday with them, that sacrifice was real. And it is important. That they lived. And that they died for something. Something necessary. Something noble. That it had meaning. And even I am not jaded enough to tell them otherwise.

So, maybe we can best honor the fallen by working sedulously to ensure that we, as a nation, do not ask soldiers to make that sacrifice in the future unless we know damn sure it is necessary, and that it serves an ideal that is noble and true. That it will have meaning. As we look back in solemn remembrance, maybe we can also look forward and recommit ourselves to rejecting preening politicians and avaricious arms dealers who would subvert that ideal, and this very day, for power and profit. Because history shows us that over one million Americans have already been willing to make that ultimate sacrifice for us, for me, and for that I am grateful.